Complete Project Gutenberg John Galsworthy Works eBook

it be that they were both asleep? Once more
he knocked on her door; then desperately turned the
handle, and took a flying glance. Empty, tidy,
untouched! Not back! He turned and ran
downstairs again. All the guests were streaming
out from dinner, and he became entangled with a group
of ‘English Grundys’ discussing a climbing
accident which had occurred in Switzerland.
He listened, feeling suddenly quite sick. One
of them, the short grey-bearded Grundy with the rather
whispering voice, said to him: “All alone
again to-night? The Stormers not back?”
Lennan did his best to answer, but something had
closed his throat; he could only shake his head.

“They had a guide, I think?” said the
‘English Grundy.’

This time Lennan managed to get out: “Yes,
sir.”

“Stormer, I fancy, is quite an expert!”
and turning to the lady whom the young ‘Grundys’
addressed as ‘Madre’ he added:

“To me the great charm of mountain-climbing
was always the freedom from people—­the
remoteness.”

The mother of the young ‘Grundys,’ looking
at Lennan with her half-closed eyes, answered:

“That, to me, would be the disadvantage; I always
like to be mixing with my own kind.”

The grey-bearded ‘Grundy’ murmured in
a muffled voice:

“Dangerous thing, that, to say—­in
an hotel!”

And they went on talking, but of what Lennan no longer
knew, lost in this sudden feeling of sick fear.
In the presence of these ‘English Grundys,’
so superior to all vulgar sensations, he could not
give vent to his alarm; already they viewed him as
unsound for having fainted. Then he grasped
that there had begun all round him a sort of luxurious
speculation on what might have happened to the Stormers.
The descent was very nasty; there was a particularly
bad traverse. The ‘Grundy,’ whose
collar was not now crumpled, said he did not believe
in women climbing. It was one of the signs of
the times that he most deplored. The mother
of the young ‘Grundys’ countered him at
once: In practice she agreed that they were out
of place, but theoretically she could not see why they
should not climb. An American standing near threw
all into confusion by saying he guessed that it might
be liable to develop their understandings. Lennan
made for the front door. The moon had just come
up over in the South, and exactly under it he could
see their mountain. What visions he had then!
He saw her lying dead, saw himself climbing down
in the moonlight and raising her still-living, but
half-frozen, form from some perilous ledge.
Even that was almost better than this actuality of
not knowing where she was, or what had happened.
People passed out into the moonlight, looking curiously
at his set face staring so fixedly. One or two
asked him if he were anxious, and he answered:
“Oh no, thanks!” Soon there would have
to be a search party. How soon? He would,
he must be, of it! They should not stop him this
time. And suddenly he thought: Ah, it is
all because I stayed up there this afternoon talking
to that girl, all because I forgot her!